Should You Pay For Sex Before You Die?

Ah, to be a millennial in 2017. You’re young, you’re beautiful and tonight, you can walk into any bar and have your pick of the finest sweet things in the room. You pick the hottest one, engage in some harmless negging and ask in your classic cavalier way if this lucky lady would like a drink. Without hesitation, the answer is a self-assured yes. Another easy ask: her number. She gives it freely and with abandon. One “Netflix-and-chill?” text later and she’s at your place, ready to fuck. For you, life is full of these easy, non-committal lays with attractive woman who have nothing to lose, right? Life is good. And when life is this good, paying for sex seems out of the question. Why pay for it when you can get it for free?

Speaking as someone who for two years worked in the industry as an agency call girl, perhaps you need to reconsider.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t paying for sex unethical?

Picture this: after years of living the good life, your career takes off. Work is stressful, so your hair begins to thin. Your sedentary office lifestyle downgrades that once-emerging six-pack into a pre-fatherhood beer belly. You finally choose a girl from the revolving door of babes and continue your American dream, settling down with a couple of kids. After fucking the same woman for a few years, you start to look at yourself and wonder, Who am I? What have I become? What happened to that strapping young buck who fucked a different hot chick every month? Sex used to be easy. Now you can barely get it up.

It’s me, the author. Photo by Nicole Bazuin

You yearn for those days of easy, non-committal sex, but look in the mirror: You’re not the stud you used to be. Your relationship with the “old lady” suffers. There’s daily bickering, a blasé sex life and one too many disagreements on how to discipline the children. One day, without warning, she leaves and takes 50 percent. To alleviate the pain, you download whatever app the cool kids are using nowadays and upload your most deceptively attractive pictures of you at the beach, the club and the game. It takes some time to conveniently crop your ex-wife and kids out of frame. A week later, no matches. For the first time in your life, the reality of being a perennial left-swipe sets in: your peak days are behind you.

You find yourself absentmindedly perusing the adult classifieds where hundreds of women are offering a plethora of sexual services. Seeing a sex worker never occurred to you when you had your pick of the hot-babe litter, but now, well, you’ve come to accept that free and easy non-committal sex may just be a vestige of the past. There’s a sting of humiliation as you realize that an attractive woman’s body, the smell of her sweet pussy, her focused attention on your body and your pleasure altogether are all luxuries and privileges you no longer have access to at whim. What exactly do you have to offer a beautiful lady besides your money?

Here’s the scoop: You don’t need to be a newly divorced bachelor reliving his glory days to enjoy the fruits of a sex worker’s labor. In fact, why not pay for sex while you’re young—while life is good? Everyone—young or old, male, female, trans, straight or queer—has plenty to gain from the focused attention of a sex worker, whose ability to produce pleasure can do wonders to alleviate loneliness, stress and general discontent. Maybe you’re happily single, but experience an occasional longing for physical intimacy. Perhaps there’s something sexual you’ve always wanted to try, but have been too afraid to ask. Sex workers to the rescue! Why not pay a professionally open-minded and non-judgmental lover to satisfy your sexual needs? After all, it could be me at your door.

The only difference between watching porn and paying for sex is human connection.

I can attest to the benefits of seeing a sex worker. Like you, I enjoy having easy, non-committal sex, but unlike you, I enjoyed it as my job. Fucking for money benefited my life in myriad ways: I made a ton of money, paid off my debt, covered my rent, traveled around the world, met fascinating people and lived to tell the tale. Sure, not every day was honky dory—how could it be when rape and murder are occupational hazards?—but on the whole, it was a great job.

In my experience, the vast majority of my clients were men between the ages of 35 and 65. They were professionals and businessmen, artists and nerds, the broken-hearted and the differently-abled—oh, and almost always married, but that’s another story. Only a few men were under the age of 30, whose lack of manners, sexual prowess and conversation abilities left a little more to be desired. But hell, I was being paid to fuck the youngin’s. What of all those hot babes they were having mediocre sex with for free?

While my older clientele tended to be polite, respectful, fun to talk to and skilled in lovemaking, millennial men fucked as if they were filming their big porno debut: Little to no eye contact or conversation and a lot of bravado amid the nausea-inducing haze of Axe body spray in the bedroom of their parents’ basement.

You can do better than that. Let a professional lover teach you how.

If you already enjoy the occasional, daily or breakfast-lunch-and-dinner viewing of pornography, consider this: you already rely on the labor of sex workers to meet your sexual, mental and emotional needs. The only difference between watching porn and paying for sex is human connection—and in this day and age, connecting with a real life human is a hot commodity. The bread and butter of a sex worker’s job is connecting with her client via listening, eye-contact, touch and sexual pleasure. Talk about bang for your buck.

But I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t paying for sex unethical? Aren’t all sex workers victims of abuse, coerced into exploitative labor that only financially benefits their pimps? That’s the stigma talking, baby. You see, as it often happens when sex workers speak for themselves—not as disempowered victims but as people who value their work—our opinions are misconstrued as exceptions to the rule. This so-called “rule” is actually prejudice serving to further disempower sex workers by ignoring their lived experiences.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t to say that some sex workers aren’t disempowered victims—not when most of their work is criminalized, they are forced to live and work in hiding, and a predator can abuse them with little legal impunity—but that shouldn’t diminish the value of their points of view.

So, should you pay for sex before you die? Sure, if having great sex with a professional—no matter your gender, orientation or perhaps most importantly, your age—is your idea of a good time. You may even wish you’d done it sooner.

But for god’s sakes, lay off the body spray.

Andrea Werhun is the author of the forthcoming book Modern Whore, a collection of memoir, fiction and photography created in collaboration with filmmaker Nicole Bazuin. Based on her two years as an escort in Toronto, the book is set to be published by [Impulse :b] in October 2017. Follow Andrea on Twitter: @andreawerhun.